A hard-drinking Aussie writer with a collapsing marriage meets THE GREEN WOMAN (2022) who shows up out of nowhere, knows a lot about him and claims she went to college on Mars — hmm, is it possible she’s not just a woman in green body paint or a drunken hallucination.
This drama became a “talking lamp” very quickly (i.e., something to glance at while I did other things), primarily because the eponymous woman has a very affected manner that I presume is meant to show her strangeness but comes off like bad acting. Nor does it help that the married couple are both unlikable — and if the writer’s making $40,000 a year, why is his wife complaining that he needs a “real” job (spoiler, some of this may be unreliable narration, but even so …). The film did pull one twist I didn’t expect but that doesn’t make it watchable. “I’m hiding all the mail as part of an evil conspiracy against all bureaucrats.”
TIM TRAVERS AND THE TIME TRAVELER’S PARADOX (2024) has the titular mad (and completely obnoxious) scientist (Samuel Dunning) successfully throw himself one minute back in time, at which point he murders his past self to see if the grandfather paradox works. It doesn’t — and then another future self shows up and kills him because Tim needs more data points to form a definite conclusion.
Things get increasingly loopy and we wind up with multiple Tims joining forces to make sense of this, which put me in mind of the Aussie time-travel comedy The Infinite Man — though having multiple Tims engage in an orgy also made me think of David Gerrold’s The Man Who Folded Himself. Unfortunately things get complicated as they have to deal with a baffled hit man (he shot Travers between the eyes! How is he still walking around?), grandfatherly hitman Danny Trejo and possible love interest Felicia Day (given she usually plays sweet goofballs, I imagine playing someone with a short-temper and a fondness for f-bombs was fun). Well worth seeing. “I do not want a repeat of the guinea pig incident — only shock the potato!”
If Howard Hawks‘ final film RIO LOBO (1970) were good, it would stand with the similar Rio Bravo and El Dorado — also written by Leigh Brackett and starring John Wayne — as a Western trilogy. Too bad it’s dreadful, a sad film for such a talented director to go out on.
During the Civil War, Col. Cord McNally (Wayne) entrusts his protege with transporting a gold shipment by rail. Confederates Cordona and Tuscarora (Jorge Rivero, Christopher Mitchum) successfully raid the shipment with inside help from someone in McNally’s unit and the protege dies in the fight. After capturing the two Rebs, McNally tells them he doesn’t take their actions personally — it’s war — but he wants the traitor’s name. In return for fair treatment, the two men promise to let him know if they ever discover it. Typical for 20th century treatment of the Civil War, everyone’s amicable — there’s mutual respect on both sides, and no political issues.
Post-war, the quest for the traitor brings McNally to Rio Lobo, where Tuscarora’s father is facing a land grab and the traitor may be lurking in the shadows. Following the template of the earlier movies we have Jack Elam as the irascible old coot and Jennifer O’Neil as a slightly immoral woman (where Angie Dickinson in Rio Bravo was a gambler’s widow, O’Neil plays a medicine-show huckster). And inevitably the fight involves holding the Big Bad in jail against all odds until the authorities — U.S. Cavalry in this case — can arrive.
The ingredients for a good movie are there but when the streamer I was using glitched ten minutes before the finish, I didn’t care. Like El Dorado, this is more about the bonds between characters than the action but outside of Wayne and Elam, the cast isn’t strong enough to build those bonds. Reflecting the increased movie violence of the era, there’s also much more on-screen blood (not huge amounts, just more) than the previous films. Quentin Tarantino loved the two previous movies but found Rio Lobo so bad he cited it as a reason not to keep directing too long and lose his mojo. “I heard the racket and somehow I knew it was you.”
MOTHER’S DAY (2016) is one of Garry Marshall’s holiday-themed rom-coms from earlier in this century (New Year’s Day, Christmas Eve, Valentine’s Day) and like them follows the Love, Actually formula of multiple plotlines and an ensemble cast. Here we have Jennifer Aniston dealing with her ex remarrying a much younger woman, Julia Roberts reconnecting with the now adult child she gave up for adoption and Kate Hudson as one of two sisters trying to hide their spouses (one interracial, one a woman) from their parents. The weakest of the four films. “You look like you have a very welcoming bosom — may I rest my child on it?”
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THIS VAST SOUTHERN EMPIRE: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy by Matthew Karp looks at how American slave states saw England’s 1830s decision to abolish slavery as the beginning of a 19th century Cold War: Britain’s influence could pressure other states into emancipating, eventually leaving the U.S. isolated (though many Southerners were convinced ending slavery was so obviously absurd it would inevitably fail). As the 3/5 clause in the Constitution gave the South disproportionate clout in the federal government, the result was an aggressive foreign policy built around sustaining and allying with slave states such as Brazil, Texas and Cuba (thoughts of England liberating Cuba and creating a nation of black revolutionaries were a major Southern bogeyman) and building up a strong enough military to counteract any overt free-the-slaves moves from Britain. Extremely interesting.
Riad Sattouf was just a kid when his parents — Syrian dad, French mother — upped and moved from France to Libya. THE ARAB OF THE FUTURE: A Childhood in the Middle East, 1978-1984 chronicles Sattouf’s culture shock and experiences dealing with family he’s never met, the policies and economic dysfunction of Khaddafi’s Libya and Assad’s Syria and his parents squabbles and political views. I think I prefer Marjane Satrapi’s 
THE TIME AXIS is a very Olaf Stapledon-ish epic by Henry Kuttner in which a boozing journalist doing an article on a high-powered scientist discovers the real purpose of his assignment is to join a team traveling to the end of time and finding a cure for the mysterious indestructible substance slowly taking over the world’s matter. The story that follows (Arnold Schoenberg’s cover captures a lot of it) seems like Kuttner just kept pumping out ideas and throwing them in — mandroids, transporters, time travel, psi-possession — but it worked for me.
big influence) is a much eerier, darker setting, and Smith is a better writer. That said, this is still entertaining and enjoyably eerie.
After launching Captain America at Marvel, Jack Kirby and Joe Simon moved to DC for a successful run (their Boy Commandos was only a little short of Superman and Batman in sales). THE NEWSBOY LEGION, Volume One collects one of their creations, the story of four homeless, orphaned newsboys (Scrapper, Tommy, Big Words and Gabby) struggling to survive in the grinding poverty of the Suicide Slum neighborhood. Jim Harper, the new cop in the slum, is finding it just as hard to accomplish anything until he adopts the masked identity of the Guardian. As the kids have an uncanny knack for stumbling onto crimes and Nazi plots, it’s just as well Harper has their back in both his identities, though it sure frustrates the kids that they can never quite prove Harper’s the man under the mask.
THE GINGER STAR was Leigh Brackett’s 1970s reboot of her Eric John Stark, showing him as an interstellar rather than an interplanetary adventurer. After Stark’s closest friend disappears on the dying backwater world of Skaith, Stark goes there to hunt for him despite opposition from the cults and gen-engineered races dominating the planet. This makes it something of a Greatest Hits mashup, taking Stark and adding in a dying world 
